Who’s Afraid of a Balance of Power?

- Walt

The United States is ignoring the most basic principle of international relations,
to its own detriment.

If you took an introduction to international relations course in college and the

instructor never mentioned the “balance of power,” please contact your alma
mater for a refund. You can find this idea in Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War,
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and the ancient Indian writer
Kautilya’s Arthashastra (“Science of Politics”), and it is central to the work of
modern realists like E.H. Carr, Hans J. Morgenthau, Robert Gilpin, and Kenneth
Waltz.

Yet despite its long and distinguished history, this simple idea is often forgotten
by America’s foreign-policy elites. Instead of asking why Russia and China are
collaborating, or pondering what has brought Iran together with its various
Middle East partners, they assume it is the result of shared authoritarianism,
reflexive anti-Americanism, or some other form of ideological solidarity. This act
of collective amnesia encourages U.S. leaders to act in ways that unwittingly
push foes closer together, and to miss promising opportunities to drive them
apart.

The basic logic behind balance of power theory (or, if you prefer, balance of
threat theory) is straightforward. Because there is no “world government” to
protect states from each other, each has to rely on its own resources and
strategies to avoid being conquered, coerced, or otherwise endangered. When
facing a powerful or threatening state, a worried country can mobilize more of
its own resources or seek an alliance with other states that face the same
danger, in order to shift the balance more in its favor.

In extreme cases, forming a balancing coalition might require a state to fight

alongside another country it previously regarded as an enemy or even one it
understood would be a rival in the future. Thus, the United States and Great
Britain allied with the Soviet Union during World War II, because defeating Nazi
Germany took precedence over their long-term concerns about communism.
Winston Churchill captured this logic perfectly when he quipped “if Hitler
invaded hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the devil in the
House of Commons.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt expressed a similar sentiment
when he said he “would hold hands with the devil” if it would help beat the Third
Reich. When you really need allies, you can’t be too choosy.

Needless to say, “balance of power” logic played an important role in U.S.

foreign policy, and especially when security concerns were unmistakable.
America’s Cold War alliances (i.e., NATO and the hub-and-spoke system of
bilateral alliances in Asia) were formed to balance and contain the Soviet Union,
and the same motive led the United States to back an array of authoritarian
regimes in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Similarly,
Richard Nixon’s opening to China in 1972 was inspired by fears of rising Soviet
power and the recognition that closer ties with Beijing would put Moscow at a
disadvantage.

Yet despite its long pedigree and enduring relevance, policymakers and pundits
often fail to recognize how balance of power logic drives the behavior of both
allies and adversaries. Part of the problem stems from the common U.S.
tendency to assume that a state’s foreign policy is mostly shaped by
its internal characteristics (i.e., its leaders’ personalities, its political and
economic system, or its ruling ideology, etc.) rather than by
its external circumstances (i.e., the array of threats it faces).

From this perspective, America’s “natural” allies are states that share our
values. When people speak of the United States as “leader of the free world,” or
when they describe NATO as a “transatlantic community” of liberal
democracies, they are suggesting that these countries are supporting each
other because they share a common vision for how the world should be
ordered.

Shared political values are not irrelevant, of course, and some empirical
studies suggesting democratic alliances are somewhat more stable than
alliances between autocracies or between democracies and nondemocracies.
Nonetheless, assuming that a state’s internal composition determines its
identification of friends and enemies can lead us astray in several ways.

First, if we believe shared values are a powerful unifying force, we are likely to
overstate the cohesion and durability of some of our existing alliances. NATO is
an obvious case in point: The breakup of the Soviet Union removed its principal
rationale, and herculean efforts to give the alliance a new set of missions have
not prevented repeated and growing signs of strain. Matters might be different if
NATO’s campaigns in Afghanistan or Libya had gone well — but they didn’t.

To be sure, the Ukraine crisis arrested NATO’s slow decline temporarily, but
this modest reversal merely underscores the central role external threats (i.e.,
fear of Russia) play in holding NATO together. “Shared values” are simply
insufficient to sustain a meaningful coalition of nearly 30 nations located on both
sides of the Atlantic, and all the more so as Turkey, Hungary, and Poland
abandon the liberal values on which NATO supposedly rests.

Second, if you forget about balance of power politics, you’re likely to be

surprised when other states (or in some cases, nonstate actors) join forces
against you. The George W. Bush administration was taken aback when
France, Germany, and Russia joined forces to block its efforts to get Security
Council approval for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a step these states took
because they understood that toppling Saddam Hussein might backfire in ways
that would threaten them (as it eventually did). Yet U.S. leaders couldn’t grasp
why these states weren’t leaping at the opportunity to remove Saddam and
transform the region along democratic lines. As Bush’s national security advisor
Condoleezza Rice later admitted, “I’ll just put it very bluntly. We simply didn’t
understand it.”

U.S. officials were equally surprised when Iran and Syria joined forces to help
the Iraqi insurgency following the U.S. invasion, even though it made perfect
sense for them to make sure the Bush administration’s effort at “regional
transformation” failed. Iran and Syria would have been next on Bush’s hit list if
the occupation had succeeded, and they were just acting as any threatened
state would (and as balance of power theory predicts). Americans have no
reason to welcome such behavior, of course, but they should not have been
surprised by it.

Third, focusing on political or ideological affinities and ignoring the role of

shared threats encourages us to see adversaries as more unified than they
really are. Instead of recognizing that opponents are cooperating with each
other largely for instrumental or tactical reasons, U.S. officials and
commentators are quick to assume that enemies are bound together by a deep
commitment to a set of common goals. In an earlier era, Americans saw the
communist world as a tightly unified monolith and mistakenly believed all
communists everywhere were reliable agents of the Kremlin. Not only did this
error lead them to miss (or deny) the rancorous Sino-Soviet split, but U.S.
leaders also mistakenly assumed that non-communist leftists were likely to be
sympathetic to Moscow as well. Soviet leaders made the same error in reverse,
by the way, only to be disappointed when their efforts to court non-communist
Third World socialists frequently backfired.

This misguided instinct lives on today, alas, in phrases like the “axis of evil”
(which implied Iran, Iraq, and North Korea were part of the same unified
movement), or in misleading terms like “Islamofascism.” Instead of seeing
extremist movements as competing organizations with a variety of worldviews
and objectives, U.S. officials and pundits routinely speak and act as if our foes
were all operating from an identical playbook. Far from being powerfully united
by a common doctrine, these groups often suffer from deep ideological schisms
and personal rivalries, and they join forces more from necessity than conviction.
They can still cause trouble, of course, but assuming all terrorists are loyal foot
soldiers in a single global movement makes them look scarier than they really
are.
Even worse, instead of looking for ways to encourage splits and schisms among
extremists, the United States often acts and speaks in ways that drive them
closer together. To take an obvious example, although there may be some
modest ideological common ground between Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis in
Yemen, the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, and the Sadr movement in Iraq,
each of these groups has its own interests and agendas, and their collaboration
is best understood as a strategic alliance rather than as a cohesive or unified
ideological front. Launching a full-court press against them — as Saudi Arabia
and Israel would like us to do — will merely give all of our adversaries even
more reason to help each other.

Lastly, ignoring balance of power dynamics squanders one of America’s chief

geopolitical advantages. As the only great power in the Western hemisphere,
the United States has enormous latitude when choosing allies and thus
enormous potential leverage over them. Given the “free security” that America’s
geographic isolation provides, it can play hard-to-get, take advantage of
regional rivalries when they occur, encourage states and nonstate actors in
distant regions to compete for our regard and support, and remain watchful for
opportunities to drive wedges between our current adversaries. This approach
requires flexibility, a sophisticated understanding of regional affairs, an aversion
to “special relationships” with other states, and a refusal to demonize countries
with which we have differences.

Unfortunately, the United States has done the exact opposite for the past few
decades, especially in the Middle East. Instead of exhibiting flexibility, we’ve
rigidly stuck to the same partners and worried more about reassuring them than
about getting them to act as we think best. We’ve deepened our “special
relationships” with Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia even as the justification for
such intimate support has grown weaker. And with occasional exceptions,
we’ve treated adversaries like Iran or North Korea as pariahs to threaten and
sanction but not to talk with. The results, alas, speak for themselves.

Notice to readers: I will be taking a short hiatus from my duties here at Foreign
Policy, in order to finish a book. I’ll resume my column in February 2018, unless
world events drag me back into the fray. Please do your best to keep things
quiet until then. Best wishes to all for a joyful holiday season and a peaceful and
prosperous 2018.